CHAPTER XXVI
HAZEN
"An unfathomable man," grumbled Mr. Harper, entering Mr. Ransom's room inmarked disorder. "They say that he has not spoken yet; but the coroner iswith him and we shall hear something from him soon. I expect--" here thelawyer's voice changed and his manner took on meaning--"that his reportwill be final."
"Final? You mean--"
"What his fainting face showed. For all its pallor and the exhaustion itexpressed, there was triumph in its every feature. The little bag was notall he saw in that pit of hell. You must prepare yourself for no commonordeal, Ransom; it will take all your courage to listen to his story."
"I know." The words came with difficulty but not without a certain manlycourage. "I shall try not to make you too much trouble." Then after amoment of oppressive silence, "Did you notice, when we all came in, thefigure of a woman disappearing up the stair way? It was Anitra's and itpaused before it reached the top, and I saw her eyes staring down atHazen's helpless figure with a wildness in its inquiry that has sappedall my courage. How are we to answer that girl when she asks us what hashappened? How make her know that Hazen is her brother and that he hasjust risked his life to satisfy himself and us that Georgian was reallylost in that dreadful pool."
The lawyer, darting a keen glance at the speaker, softly shook his head.
"I am not thinking of Miss Hazen," said he. "I'm wondering how far theproof he has obtained will go." He paused, listening, then made a gesturetowards the hall. "There's some one there," he whispered.
Ransom rose, and with a quick turn of the wrist pulled open the door.
A man was standing on the threshold, a ghastly figure before which Ransominvoluntarily stepped back.
"Hazen!" he cried; then, as the other tottered, he sprang forward againand, reaching out his hand to steady him, drew him in with the remark,"We were expecting a summons from you. We are happy that you findyourself able to come to us."
"The coroner has just gone. The doctors I dismissed. I have something tosay to you--to both of you," he added as he caught sight of Mr. Harper.
Entering slowly, he sat down in the chair proffered him by the lawyer.There was something strange in his air, a quiet automaton-like qualitywhich attracted the latter's notice and led him to watch him veryclosely. Ransom was busy with the door, which the strong west windblowing through the hall made difficult to close.
"I--" The one word uttered, Hazen seemed to forget himself. Sitting quitestill, he gazed straight before him at the open window. There was littleto be seen there but the swaying boughs of the huge tree, but his gazenever left those tossing limbs, and his sentence hung suspended till themovement made by Ransom recrossing the room roused him, and he went on.
"I have made the plunge, gentlemen, and fortune favored me. I--" here hisvoice failed him again, but realizing the fact more quickly than before,he shook off his apathy, and facing the two men, who awaited his slowwords with inconceivable excitement, continued with sudden concentrationupon his subject, "I saw what I went to see--poor Georgian's body. I havesatisfied the coroner of this fact. The little bag I tore from her sideproves her identity beyond a doubt. You saw it, Mr. Harper. They tell methat you recognized it at once as the same you saw in her hand in thestage-coach. But if you had not, the initials on it are unmistakable, G.Q. H., Georgian Quinlan Hazen. Auchincloss will get his money, and soon,will he not? Answer me plainly, Harper. Such an experience merits somereward. You will not make difficulties?"
"I?" The lawyer's query had a strange ring to it. He glanced from Hazento Ransom, and from Ransom back to Hazen, whose features had now becomemore composed, though they still retained their remarkable pallor.
"If the proof is positive," he then went on, "you assuredly can trustboth my client and myself to remember our promise to you."
"The coroner, you say, is satisfied?"
"Yes, with the proof and my sworn statement. He is obliged to be. No oneelse, least of all himself, feels any desire to go down to that whirlingeddy for confirmation of my story. And they are wise. I do not thinkthat any man with less experience than myself could sound the depths ofthat vortex and come up alive. The noise--the swirl--the sense of beingsucked down--down in ever-increasing fury--but my purpose kept the lifein me. I was determined not to yield, not to faint, till I had seen--andproved--"
"What's that?"
The cry was from Mr. Ransom. A sudden gust of wind had torn its waythrough the room, flinging the door wide, and strewing the floor withflying papers from the large stand in the window.
"Nothing but wind," answered Harper, half rising to close the door, butimmediately sitting down again with a strange look at Ransom. "Let be,"he whispered, as the other rose in his turn to restore order. "Keep Hazentalking. It's important; imperative. I'll see to the door."
But it was the window he closed, not the door.
Ransom, with that obedience natural to a client in presence of his mosttrusted adviser, did as he was bid, and turned his full attention back toHazen instantly. That gentleman, upon whom the rushing wind and the havocit created had made little if any impression, rushed again into words.
"I've led an adventurous life," he declared, "and, in the last few yearsespecially, passed through many perils and experienced much awfulsuffering. I have felt the pang of hunger and the pang of biting despair;but nothing I have ever endured can equal the horror which beclouded mymind and rendered powerless my body as I felt myself sliding from thesight of earth and heaven into the jaws of that rapacious eddy, whosebottom no man had ever sounded.
"I went in young--I have come out old. Look at my hands--they shake likethose of a man of ninety. Yet yesterday they could have pulled to theground an ox."
"You saw Mrs. Ransom's body down in that pool some fathoms below thesurface," observed the lawyer, after waiting in vain for some word fromthe shrinking husband. "Won't you particularize, Mr. Hazen? Tell us justhow she was lying and where. Mr. Ransom cannot but wish to know,difficult as he evidently finds it to ask you."
"The coroner has the story," Hazen began, with the slow, painful gasp ofthe unwilling narrator. "But I will tell it again; it is your right, thepainful duty which we cannot escape. She was lying, not on the bottom,but in a niche of rock into which she had been thrown and wedged by theforce of the current. One arm was free and was washing about; I tried toclutch this arm as I went down, but it eluded me. When I arose, the rushand swirl of the water was against me and I felt my senses going, butenough instinct was left for me to snatch again at the arm as I passed,and though it eluded me again, my fingers closed on something, which Iwas just conscious enough to hold on to with a frenzied grip. We havespoken of this thing--a little bag which must have been fastened to herside, for the end of its connecting strap is torn away by the wrench Igave it."
"Vivid enough; but I am sure you will tell me one thing more. Did you seethe face of this body as well as the arm? It would greatly add to thestrength of your testimony if you could describe it."
Ransom, who had been watching Hazen, cast a sudden look back at thelawyer as he dropped these insinuating words. Something more than acold-blooded desire for truth had prompted this almost brutalinquisition. He must know what it was, if anything in Harper'swell-controlled countenance would tell him. The result transfixed him,for following the lawyer's gaze, which was fixed not on the man he wasaddressing but on a small mirror hanging on the opposite wall, he sawreflected in it the face and form of Anitra standing in the opendoorway behind them.
She was looking at Hazen and, as Ransom noted that look, he understoodHarper's previous caution and all that lay behind his insistent andcold-blooded questions. For her gaze was no longer one of simple inquirybut of horrified understanding;--_the gaze of one who heard_.
Meantime, Hazen was answering in painful gasps the lawyer's pointedquestion, "Did you see the face of this body as well as the arm?"
"Did I see--God help me, yes. Just a glimpse, but I knew it. Eyes that mymother had kissed, blind--staring--glassed
in awe and unspeakable fright.The mouth, whose every curve I had studied in the old days of perfectaffection, drawn into a revolting grin and dripping with unwholesomeweeds brought down from the shallows. All strange, yet all familiar--mysister--Georgian--dead--stark--but recognizable. Don't ask me if I sawit. I always see it; it is before me now, the forehead--the chin--theeyes--"
Ransom sprang to his feet, Harper also.
The girl in the doorway had gone white as death, and with outstretchedarms and frantic, haggard eyes was striving to ward off the frightfulvision conjured up by her brother's words. The movement made by thetwo men recalled her in an instant to herself, and she drew back--thehesitating, appealing, anxious-eyed girl whom they all knew. But itwas too late. Hazen had seen as well as the others, and leaping infrenzy from his chair stood confronting her--a dominant and accusingfigure--between the quietly triumphant lawyer and the crushed, almostunconscious Ransom.
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